WEEK 23: Landscape: Weather – This week should be as unpredictable as the weather! Feature the weather in this week’s landscape.
How difficult can this be, fer cryin’ out loud? I am still British (as well as American) so I should have a genetic predisposition to evaluating the weather for hours on end. After all, my homeland is famously described as a country that “doesn’t have a climate, only weather.”
However, this may be one of those instances when too much interest is a bad thing, since my desire for an interesting shot of our summer weather in Pennsylvania has resulted in nothing but procrastination and delay on this assignment for weeks on end.
I may have mentioned previously that I usually keep at least one camera in the car with me so, as there were storm clouds rolling in on my drive to work, I stopped off and decided to get a shot of those to support the rather surprising statistic that July is our wettest month here.
As I picked up my camera I thought I’d make the shot more interesting by creating a high dynamic range (HDR) image to bring out the clouds. This entails taking 3 identical shots with slightly different exposure settings (+/- 0.3EV) to bring out the highlights and shadows and then merging them into one image. The resulting image is technically a low dynamic range representation of the HDR composition following tonemapping, but we still call them HDR photos. Anyway, using the portable version of the superb free software LuminanceHDR I created the following image of clouds rumbling in over the trees and the communication antenna tower near to where I work.
If you’d like to see some more of my HDR work click the image above or here.
~Richard
searching4theshot 
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